Quotes From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" By Joseph J. Ellis

Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means. Joseph J. Ellis

Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr’s somewhat stationary shadow. Joseph J. Ellis

For Madison, on the other hand, “a Public Debt is a Public curse, ” and “in a Representative Government greater than in any other.”26 Joseph J. Ellis

The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par–that is, the full value of the government’s original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. What’s more, the release of Hamilton’s plan produced.. . Joseph J. Ellis

In time to come be shaped by the human mind.” Asked Joseph J. Ellis

I am not a Federalist, ” he declared in 1789, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Joseph J. Ellis

Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good. Joseph J. Ellis